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New Requirements to Private Message

Due in part to Cracked.com's highlight of Star Wars:Revisited, Fanedit.org has received an influx of new members. We'd like to welcome you to our community and hope you enjoy your stay.

Because of this influx of new sign ins we've also had an increase in private messages being sent to faneditors with simple: "I want a copy of your edit. Send me the link." The editors here are generally friendly and gracious but this sort of PM not only wastes their time it comes off as rude. (It should be noted that some new users have been very friendly in their PM's, with detailed explanations of how they came about fanedits and what they're interested in. For your politeness we say thank you.)

The faneditors here have provided the members here with countless hours of entertainment sharing their work, and because of that we are protective of them. Without their hard work and dedication to the art of fanediting this site wouldn't exist. Unfortunately, the rudeness of several users has led us to implement a new rule: private messaging is only available to users with five posts or more in the forum. There are a few reasons for this:

Your question can easily be answered if you took five minutes doing a search of the forums.

We want to avoid the "ask and dash" syndrome. We are a community and we want people to participate on this site. This includes discussions in the forum as well as rating and reviewing fan edits. Registering to PM someone a question, and then never be heard from again does not serve this community in any way.

You're wasting an editors time.

Again, a couple new users have been very friendly in the private messages but the "Give me the link" far outweigh those. We want to apologize to those that have taken the time to write well thought out PM's and want to encourage you to stick around and participate. We are (in general) a friendly bunch.

'Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves'

Bill

Guybrush: Im looking for 30 dead guys and one woman.
Cannibal: I dont want to hear anymore about it.

Is there any difference in five one word replies or ten? Not really. I think five replies is plenty for a person to show a commitment to the site and fanediting. I used to run a couple of websites where downloads of tv/radio/internet caps were available of a musician. I could quite clearly see how many times the files were downloaded, but very few, if any, people would even say thank you. I tried a few different things, but the bottom line was that there were always people who just want to selfishly take things and you can't stop it. If you go too far with rules, you end up punishing the few decent people that care about what you are doing and do not take it for granted. In the end, I decide to focus on those few people and just stop thinking about the selfish majority. They'll get what's coming to them eventually.

I think 5 is a good start. If we see new members abusing the 5 post minimum (i.e. posting non-sense posts quickly just to be able to access private messages) we will either ban them or bump the required post count. Hopefully new members will respect this rule and become participating members of the site.

Is there any difference in five one word replies or ten? Not really. I think five replies is plenty for a person to show a commitment to the site and fanediting.

With my experience of the internet over the last fifteen years We'll just have to agree to disagree.

Originally Posted by Q2

When we see new members abusing the 5 post minimum

Fixed that for ya

'Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves'

Bill

Guybrush: Im looking for 30 dead guys and one woman.
Cannibal: I dont want to hear anymore about it.

All seems a bit New Labour to me. Mind u I haven't seen the PM's that people have been sending, but it seems like this is going to put off a lot of people. If somebody's never seen a fanedit before *and* the website for downloading them is quite confusing (as it currently is) *and* the message board is quite complicated *and* there's a community that tend to be very snippy with people when they deem their questions 'stupid', I can see a lot of people giving up before they've even viewed a single fanedit, which seems like a real shame. Is there no way of giving each faneditor an 'opt in/out' option so they could say in advance if require people to have reached an arbitrary message quota before they are contactable. I would certainly prefer to be accessable if anybody wants to contact me, and dislike the idea of new members being banned from contacting me until they've put in a certain amount of time in. It seems a bit snooty and elitist to me: no you can't message me because you haven't demonstrated yourself to be worth recieving a message from yet.

All seems a bit New Labour to me. Mind u I haven't seen the PM's that people have been sending, but it seems like this is going to put off a lot of people. If somebody's never seen a fanedit before *and* the website for downloading them is quite confusing (as it currently is) *and* the message board is quite complicated *and* there's a community that tend to be very snippy with people when they deem their questions 'stupid', I can see a lot of people giving up before they've even viewed a single fanedit, which seems like a real shame. Is there no way of giving each faneditor an 'opt in/out' option so they could say in advance if require people to have reached an arbitrary message quota before they are contactable. I would certainly prefer to be accessable if anybody wants to contact me, and dislike the idea of new members being banned from contacting me until they've put in a certain amount of time in. It seems a bit snooty and elitist to me: no you can't message me because you haven't demonstrated yourself to be worth recieving a message from yet.

The thing you aren't considering, FoolsFollowing, is that they can still post a question on the forum, which 9 times out of 10 will generate a faster community response than PM'ing me would anyway. The rule seems reasonable. I for one don't have time to answer endless PM questions from new members.

That said, it is true that the site is less new-member friendly now, so the odds of me getting endless new member PM's anytime in the foreseeable future is probably slim unless I have a new edit highlighted on the home page or an old edit gets referenced in Cracked.com!

Addendum: Admin recommendation: The generic popup message that new members receive when they try to PM should be friendly with directions of either posting their question on the edit's forum thread or in a technical help thread. This will hopefully keep them from posting 5 lame posts just to circumvent the PM restriction.

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